Speaking like a Spanish Cow: Cultural Errors in Translation

What is a cultural error? What causes it? What are the consequences of such an error?

This volume enables the reader to identify cultural errors and to understand how they are produced. Sometimes they come about because of the gap between the source culture and the target culture; on other occasions they are the result of the cultural inadequacies of the translator, or perhaps the ambiguity arises because of errors in the reception of the translated text. The meta-translational problem of the cultural error is explored in great detail in this book. The authors address the fundamental theoretical issues that underpin the term. The essays examine a variety of topics ranging from the deliberate political manipulation of cultural sources in Russia to the colonial translations at the heart of Edward FitzGerald's famous translation The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Adopting a resolutely transdisciplinary approach, the seventeen contributors to this volume come from a variety of academic backgrounds in music, art, literature, and linguistics. They provide an innovative reading of a key term in translation studies today.

“The several topics discussed in this volume make it of deep interest for scholars of several disciplines. To paraphrase Cronin's foreword to the book, translation is not just a dichotomy or a play of oppositions; instead it is composed of many elements. In this book, the editors consider, describe and analyze these elements from several different angles.”

"A valuable contribution to the multidimensional understanding of cultural errors in translation."—Prof. Jean-René Ladmiral, Université Paris-Nanterre, author of "Traduire – Théorèmes pour la traduction"
"It was pleasantly surprising to read in the collection studies on peripheral cultures and languages, such as Persian, but it was equally disheartening to find a lack of representation of Asian languages, which would have made exceptional study cases of cultural errors. This of course, in no way, diminishes the contribution that the volume offers in the field of translation studies. Comparatists and cross-cultural studies enthusiasts, like myself, will also find the book especially relevant in an academic world where the death of comparative literature has been predicted more than once. While books like this one do not deny the prophecy, they do show that perhaps the discipline is not doomed to disappear but is making a return in a different form."—Laura L. Velazquez, TranscUlturAl, vol. 12.2 (2020)
“It presents a wider vision of translation, considering cultural errors from two perspectives: production (whether conscious or not) and reception. Moreover it shows the reciprocal cause-effect relationship between such errors and the social, historical and political issues that, on the one hand, mold the source and target’s cultural expectations and knowledge but, on the other, affect and transform public opinion and one’s sense of society due to the use of deliberate cultural errors as a creative strategy.”—Virginia Mattioli, Babel journal, vol. 66:3, 2020

Clíona Ní Ríordáin is professor of Translation Studies at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, France. She co-directs the Atelier POEM and teaches a postgraduate seminar on "Traduction: Pouvoir et Marges", which examines questions of power and marginality in a variety of intercultural contexts. She has co-edited and co-translated three bilingual poetry anthologies. Her translation of Michel Déon’s Horseman, Pass By! was published in 2017 (Lilliput Press, Dublin). Stephanie Schwerter is professor of Anglophone literature at the Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France. Previously, she taught Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Before moving to France, she spent six years in Northern Ireland, working at the University of Ulster and at Queen’s University Belfast.

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